About Nietzsche's Features

Updated
The concept.
Originality ?
Why not just link ?
How can I link to Nietzsche's Features?
Can I put the search form on my website ?
Browser Incompatibilities
Why do you give away the site as a download ?
What about copyrights ?
And a BIG thank you goes to..

How to read Nietzsche.

Nietzsche has always hammered home that one should NOT read his works like one would read just about any other book. They are not to be read like books AT ALL. As he describes it on numerous occasions, you should pick out one aforism, or one idea, and then go for a walk, meanwhile digesting it, playing around with it, looking at it from all possible perspectives and thinking it through, to the very end. Nietzsche is about learning how to think, and how to think correctly, how to observe the multiple traps and the fallacies of language, reason and logic. Nietzsche is not about memorising and parotting nice lines, although he excelled at masterfully crafting plenty of them.

There is no Nietzsche System, despite some Academic pundits still trying desperately to prove there is. There are no contradictions, although his works seem to be full of them. What seems outrageously inconsistent from one perspective makes perfect sense from another one. Perspectivism is what matters more than anything else. As such it is not so much an exercise in finding the Truth or the real Value, but rather questioning whether Truth and Value could even exist and be real, without getting caught up in a nihilistic quagmire. In many ways it is not so much about finding answers, but more about looking closely at how (in)valid most of our questions really are.

Does it matter whether God created the Universe or whether Darwin's theory should apply, if the initial question - and everything it implied - was a stupid and invalid one anyway? You can question and even reject Darwin's theory without therefore logically supporting the Church's, if the question both theories were trying to answer turns out to be an invalid one to start with. The question of the origin of life is automatically implying that there has to be one. And what if there isn't? What if it is all "eternal recurrence" instead? In several ways Nietzsche put a bomb under the Hegelian dialectic method that is still being abused so often in our contemporary society to manipulate discussions and decisions.

Nietzsche's relationship with what is now generally known as "The Enlightenment" is as puzzling - and funny - at times as Mephistopheles' with Faust and his ilk in Goethe's masterpiece. Although it is unlikely that Nietzsche had much knowledge of them, there are definitely occasional similarities to be found with ancient classic Chinese Taoism and even classic Chinese Zen, "Classic" here meaning the earliest ancient versions of them, not the Californicated versions that have become so popular in New Age circles.

Nietzsche has been used and abused and accused of just about any sin in the moral catalog. But was he really Atheist? Would that term have had any meaning for him? Was he really Anti-Christian? Or was he just being overly provocative and using these Mephistophelean outbursts to drive his point home? His criticisms on issues like education, politics, arts and even science, including philosophy, are no less harsh - and well over 100 years later one can add: and to the point.

Nietzsche's legacy is a journey. Forget about the destination. There's plenty of enchantment awaiting you on those mountain tops, if you have the nerve to confront your Seven Solitudes and if you have the strength to carry your Ego along on those steep climbs, where the air gets thinner and the views can become overwhelmingly bewildering.

Updated...

Jan 24th 2011: Site was updated to deal with wide screen monitors and recent browsers. The days of 800x600 resolution and IE supremacy are long gone! Made some layout changes as well, fixed search and cleaned up the links page... and then some.

The concept:

The idea for Nietzsche's Features came from the experience we had over the last years that although several individuals invested a lot of time and effort in creating Nietzsche pages, after a while they somehow seemed to disapear from the web. In particular Universities seem to have the (questionable) tendency to simply delete students' and even lecturers' accounts on their servers - including the files stored on them of course - as soon as those people leave the institution.
Of course that resulted in a lot of dead links and lost files.
On the other hand, several people that started out enthousiastically, got bored or just tired with it and moved on to something else.
To prevent all these files from ever being lost again - to preserve them on the web, so to speak - we have decided to collect ALL files we can find on the web, in English, that are directly related to Nietzsches works, and archive them in what has become the "Nietzsche's Features" website.

Originality?

We have no problem admitting that a lot of work on the texts you will find here has initially been done by others. That's why we give them credit for it. However, we do not just simply "steal" their pages. All pages are completely redesigned as you will notice from the uniform look of all works presented herein. As anybody involved in webdesign knows, redesigning can sometimes be a more tedious effort than designing.
Also, it should be mentioned that on several occasions we have tediously edited and corrected pages we found somewhere else. (a process that is still continuing by the way)
And there is of course the fact that we contributed three complete books to the archive ourselves ("Thus Spake Zarathustra", "Beyond Good and Evil" and "Human All Too Human")
We do not have any intention to compete with anybody else's Nietzsche page. We place ourselves outside of any competition - might there be any - our only goal is to make sure that all the energy that has ever been put into Nietzsche pages on the web, is archived and preserved on this website.

Why not just link to other pages. ?

We had to abandon the idea of linking to other peoples pages for two reasons :
1. As already mentioned above, we can not preserve a page by just linking to it. We'd end up with a dead link after the page has been deleted.
2. From the initial stages of the concept, we had decided to make the resources we offer here fully searchable, which makes it impossible to just link to somebody elses page. We can not just search webpages stored on some server somewhere else. That's why we "copy" the pages, redesign them and then include them in the archive.

How can I best link to Nietzsche's Features?

The best way to link to this website is to link
A) directly to the homepage by using ONLY the redirect URL http://turn.to/nietzsche
B) to one of the directories (NOT recommended).
All books have been set up as a seperate directory. So if you want to link to a specific book, link to that directory (you don't even need the index.htm file in your URL.) Please do NOT link to any other pages, as we are constantly refining page titles, and this website's overall structure. Please be aware of the fact that we have had to move this website several times because of the demise of free hosting services, that's why the safest link and the only guarantuee you never end up with a dead link will always be by ONLY linking to http://turn.to/nietzsche.
NOTE : please pay attention to the fact that on the homepage we will be doing several browser tests, to make sure every visitor will be redirected to the appropriate sub-pages. That is why we recommend you to preferrably only link directly to http://turn.to/nietzsche. We will improve browser compatibility in the next months.

Can I put the search form on my Nietzsche page?

Yes, you are free to use the search form on our search page on your website or Nietzsche page. Just save the page to your hard drive and copy and paste the code. (you'll have to figure out how to do that yourself or email us)

Browser Compatibility:

This website works in any modern browser, be it Opera, Chrome, Firefox, Safari or even IE and I'm sure there's a few out there I don't even know about. If they support html and CSS it should be OK. For fancy round borders etc don't use IE.(and be more secure online at the same time).

Why do you give away the site as a download?

temporarily removed while doing a makeover of the site.

What about copyrights?

All works on this website, as far as we know and have been able to track down, are in the public domain and therefore NOT copyrighted (anymore).
We have put together this 'labour of love' but that does not mean we now own the copyright to any of the works or translations published here. What is considered to be in the public domain remains there.
We have had several questions about our non-copyright statement : by saying none of the works here are copyrighted and by not claiming copyright ourselves to the contents nor the design/layout we are allowing anyone to use any part of this website as they want - that is of course NOT including our name and logo !! - whether that would be in print (articles, essays etc etc) or on a website or whatever other way one could come up with. You do not need to mention that you got it at http://turn.to/nietzsche - although we would of course appreciate it if you did.

And a BIG thank you goes to ...

Thanks to James Chester from publicappeal.org for hosting this site for several years. And thanks to COMBELL for hosting it now.

Anyway Enjoy !!

January 1st 2002
Updated: January 26th 2011
Holtof Donné
holtof.com

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